Windows Home Server Eases My Suffering
I recently had an experience that I wish nobody had to go through but happens all the time: I got robbed. Not the held up at gunpoint type robbery (thank goodness) but the come home to find your home trashed and stuff missing type of robbed. This is not an experience I can really describe since even in my memory it is very surreal. I won't go there but I will describe what happened and how my Windows Home Server (WHS) made things a lot easier.
Essentially a person (or a couple people) broke into my house, rifled through everything, and took as much as they could carry (so it seems). The item taken of interest here is my main desktop. This was the machine I used daily for everything from playing games to doing my home finances to research for work. My lifeline at home. One thing they didn't take was the ugly looking machine in the closet which is, you guessed it, my WHS. There is an advantage to building your WHS as a Frankenstein looking machine: it's ugly enough thieves don't want it. What this means is that even though my desktop hardware is gone I haven't lost any data. The machine was backing itself up the the WHS daily. In a time of stress this was a nice piece of the puzzle I just didn't have to worry about.
What I ended up doing while waiting for my insurance to cover the loss was use a really old machine as a desktop and had it back up to WHS as well. When I finally got the insurance and bought a new machine getting back to where I was before the theft was simple. I put in the WHS restore CD, followed the prompts, waited a few hours and everything worked. Then I simply opened the backup of the temp machine and grabbed files that I had changed. I didn't have to reinstall the OS and all my programs. The restore took care of that.
Even though my primary reason for setting up a WHS machine was to protect against HD failure I ended up with protection from the complete theft of one of my machines. Now I need to look into backing up the files on WHS offsite so a theft or destruction of the WHS machine won't be catastrophic either. Who knew I needed disaster recovery at home?
Thank you WHS.